Otto van Veen

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Otto van Veen

1556-1629

In quocumque vitae genere philosophari licet

Brush and gray and light brown oil, and pen and brown ink; on a paper prepared with a brown ground of lead white tinted with yellow-brown ochre and a little red in oil medium.

7 1/8 x 5 13/16 inches (181 x 147 mm)

Purchased by Pierpont Morgan (1837-1913) in 1909.

Van Veen Album, folio 72

Notes:

Watermark: since the drawings are laid down, no watermarks, if any, are visible, even with fiber-optic light.
Engraved in reverse, 1607.
Also see records on Van Veen Album (III, 146-157).

Inscription:

Inscribed on the album page below the design, in brown ink, "In quocumqúe vitae genere philosophari licet (title) / Si pranderet olús patienter, Regibús uti / Nollet Aristippús, si sciret Regibus uti / Fastidiret olus qúi me notat" (If Aristippus could be content to dine on greens, he would not want to live with princes. If he who knew how to live with princes, he would sniff at greens). The text is from Horace, "Epistles", Book I, 17, lines 13-15.

Provenance:

Charles Fairfax Murray (1849-1919), London and Florence; from whom purchased through Galerie Alexandre Imbert, Rome, in 1909 by Pierpont Morgan (1837-1913), New York (no mark; see Lugt 1509); his son, J. P. Morgan, Jr. (1867-1943), New York.

Bibliography:

Netherlandish drawings of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and Flemish drawings of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the Pierpont Morgan Library / Felice Stampfle ; with the assistance of Ruth S. Kraemer and Jane Shoaf Turner. New York : The Library, 1991, p. 89, no. 184.

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